Hiring Developers in Latin America

This year’s Developer Survey was the largest we’ve ever fielded, with over 100,000 developers sharing which technologies they use and what they’re looking for in a job. We can also use this comprehensive survey to understand the developer population in different regions around the world.

So far, we’ve released data for regions such as North America, the UK and Ireland, and, most recently, the Asia-Pacific region. This blog post explores Latin America, another region that is growing in importance and has an impact in the software industry. Learn more about the population of software developers in this region, what their characteristics are, and how they compare to their counterparts elsewhere.

Developers in Latin America

There were 5,414 respondents to our survey from Latin America, with almost half coming from Brazil.

After Brazil, the next most represented countries in this region are Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile. When we compare the geographical representation on our survey with the distribution of our traffic, we mostly see overall agreement, with some countries (including Mexico) responding at lower rates compared to their traffic.

Developer Roles

Just like in the global developer population, the most common types of developers in Latin America are web developers; over 60% of LATAM developers identify as back-end developers and almost half say they are full-stack developers. We can compare developer populations in Latin America and the rest of the world to see which type of software work is more or less likely to be pursued by developers in this region.

We don’t see dramatic differences between the developer roles in Latin America compared to the rest of the world; the largest differences are about 30%. However, Latin America does have fewer people working in DevOps and data science than North America and Europe. These have been some of the fastest growing and most impactful sectors of software development in recent years, so companies in Latin America have room to grow and reap the business benefits of embracing these types of roles.

Respondents from Brazil make up the largest portion of our Latin American survey respondents, so we can also look at how the type of work that developers engage in is different within Brazil compared to outside of it.

The most noticeable insight here is how prevalent embedded developers working with physical devices are in Brazil. We may be seeing the impact of how important industry is to Brazil’s economy, with its large, advanced manufacturing sector.

Salary Trends

Our Developer Survey is one of the richest sources for software industry salary data available, and this year we had 2,373 respondents share salary data within the LATAM region.

We asked each respondent their salary in a local currency and converted to USD. Comparing salaries in USD can give us insight into global earning power, but naturally does not take into account country-to-country differences in local cost of living (or, in this case, any effects from economic crises in Latin American countries).

Developers with more years of experience are paid more, but we also see that certain types of coding work pays higher at the same level of experience. In Latin America, data scientists and engineering managers are high earners for their level of experience.

This plot shows data for the entire LATAM region, but the overall pattern holds for Latin American countries outside of Brazil.

Most Popular Technologies

In Latin America, like in the world overall, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are the most commonly used programming/scripting/markup languages. Which languages do LATAM developers love to use, though? The most loved language in each country is the language that proportionally, more developers want to continue working with than any other language. The most dreaded language is the one that developers do not want to continue using. The most wanted language is the language that developers who do not yet use most often say they want to learn.

Country

Loved

Dreaded

Wanted

Brazil

Kotlin

Visual Basic 6

Python

Mexico

Python

VBA

Python

Argentina

Python

Visual Basic 6

JavaScript

Colombia

TypeScript

C

JavaScript

Chile

Python

C

JavaScript

Peru

JavaScript

PHP

JavaScript

Venezuela

HTML

PHP

JavaScript

Dominican Republic

HTML

PHP

JavaScript

Costa Rica

JavaScript

C#

Java

Uruguay

JavaScript

Java

JavaScript

This table is ordered in descending number of respondents, from Brazil with the most respondents to smaller countries with the fewest. In Brazil, Kotlin is the most loved programming language among our respondents, a language that came in second as globally loved. Not all countries had enough users of each language to measure how loved or dreaded it is, but notice how the groups of beloved languages include Kotlin, Python, and TypeScript, while the groups of languages that developers do not enjoy working with include Visual Basic 6, VBA, and PHP. Latin American developers have similar preferences about language tooling as their global counterparts.

Developers at Work

Developers in Latin America are quite similar to the overall global population in their tooling preferences, but exhibit some differences in other characteristics. Latin American developers have an average of just over 5 years of professional coding experience, about the same at developers in the Asia-Pacific region. This is lower than regions such as North America or Europe, where the average is 10.

LATAM developers are more likely to work at the smallest companies, and are more likely to work at companies that do web development/design or IT (compared to North America and Europe, where more developers work at more diverse companies across the economy).

Career satisfaction is another factor where LATAM developers exhibit some differences compared to the global population. Outside of Latin America, the average career satisfaction rate (extremely or moderately satisfied) is just under 50%. Developers in countries like Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia have satisfaction ratings about the same, but Brazil (where the most developers are) has noticeably lower satisfaction.

Looking for a New Position

In general, the more experience a developer population has, the less that population is actively looking for a new job. We see that whether we look at individual developer types within a single country or countries within a region. Sometimes we see outliers in this kind of relationship as well; notice that developers in Cuba, Peru, and Colombia have about the same average years of experience, but many more developers in Cuba are looking for a new job.

Developers in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil have the most experience in Latin America and are seeking new jobs at about the same rate as developers globally. Developers in countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Peru are seeking new jobs at high rates compared to the global rate. Hiring a new developer will be relatively more difficult in a place like Argentina or Brazil than a place like Colombia or Venezuela. We do not see that developers’ overall earnings by country (in USD) strongly influence how likely they are to be on the job market in Latin America.

Julia Silge is a data scientist at Stack Overflow. She enjoys making beautiful charts, the statistical programming language R, black coffee, red wine, and the mountains of her adopted home state of Utah. She has a PhD in astrophysics and an abiding love for Jane Austen.